Vernon Lee and Oscar Wilde met in 1881 during Lee’s first visit to England. Between these similar personalities a mixture of rivalry, mutual admiration and understanding soon arose. Lee immortalized that encounter in her letters and in the controversial romanà clefMiss Brown (1884), which annoyed many of her contemporaries, Wilde among them. Consequently, the two writers met on few other occasions, one of which in 1894 at il Palmerino, where Wilde accompanied Mary Costelloe (later Mrs Berenson) in the hope of seeing Lee’s brother, the poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton. With Wilde’s arrest in 1895 they lost contacts, nor did they meet after his release from prison, although it is possible to conjecture that Lee sided with him. Starting from the limited autobiographical and critical material available, as well as using the semi-fictional memories in Miss Brown, my paper investigates the personal and creative relationship between these two important figures of the Aesthetic Movement.

Elisa Bizzotto is lecturer in English literature at IUAV University of Venice. She has written on Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, Aubrey Beardsley and Pre-Raphaelitism and is especially interested in genre, gender, myth, inter-art and comparative approaches. She edited, with Serena Cenni, Dalla stanza accanto. Vernon Lee e Firenze settant’anni dopo (2006) and co-edited the first Italian edition of the Pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ (2008). She is the author of La mano e l’anima. Il ritratto immaginario fin de siècle (2001) and the co-author of The Germ. Origins and Progenies of Pre-Raphaelite Interart Aesthetics (2012).